Strawberry Festival 2016: Brought To You By Exploitation

The collective protest challenges the tourism agenda of the City, calls attention to social problems connected to the agricultural industry and greater Oxnard, and occurs in solidarity with local workers, as well as with agricultural workers in Washington and Mexico who have amplified their resistance to exploitation and abuse within the industry.

This protest with the community of Oxnard challenges the agricultural industry’s and Oxnard city’s efforts to overlook the social and environmental costs of Strawberry production, and questions the logic of charity festivals. While the City celebrates itself, in the interest of tourism and at the service of industry owners, we who live and work in Oxnard and Ventura County are left with human and environmental exploitation, including respiratory illnesses, cancer, unsafe work, and discrimination. There are numerous examples -too many to name here – but documented extensively by environmental justice research projects like those of Reveal News (formerly known as Center for Investigative Reporting), by farmworker testimonies in Baja California and Washington, and their support networks north of the border.

Industry and city officials, even charities and non-profit social change organizations are aware, but, unfortunately, all benefit materially, and are largely silent, watered down in their concerns, or structurally limited in instituting meaningful labor and environmental reforms.

The agricultural industry in general is tied into a global network of exported exploitation and imported products and labor. They rely on harmful chemicals that linger in the neighborhoods of farmworker communities, affecting the lifetime health of children and elders. Strawberry growers, such as those from Reiter Affiliated Companies and Driscoll’s and its subsidiaries are well aware, and have responded through re-branding efforts that attempt to portray fairness with which workers are treated, their local education programs to improve farmworker health (focused, of course on “educating” farmworkers about healthy choices, rather than any causal relationship between the work itself and pesticides).

But, are not our elected leaders, state, and local, protecting us? Haven’t the industry representatives reassured us of the safety of Methyl Bromide? Surely, to the extent that a City and State dependent on 2.6 billion industry dollars would be willing or even able to jeopardize that, we can rely on them for progressive change and better working conditions. We understand that when our community leaders including community organizations that work on behalf of farmworker and working class families, or when our cultural historians of the farmworker movement also rely on foundation funding from this industry, they are by definition unable to maintain an independent voice. This is not due necessarily to moral failure, but as even our leaders and designated spokespeople will admit, is simply the nature of the system.

Meanwhile, boycotts have spread from Mexico to Washington, while local “leaders” and groups discourage mention of such active resistance at quasi cultural-political productions unless permission to speak and protest is formally approved by the mainstream alliance of industry, the city, police, and co-opted community leaders. The 1960’s Farmworker movement nostalgia and political dependency on industry has prevented critical interventions in exploitation while officially sanctioned marches lend the Struggle to fake political photo ops.

The festival’s charity money can not cover for the social problems here in Oxnard: police violence, gentrification and economic violence, environmental racism, and exploitation of undocumented workers. In Oxnard, a recent history of resisting economic violence continues, such as when farmworker students refuse the indulgence scholarship money of Driscoll’s and other industries. While boycotts have spread from Mexico to Washington, endemic problems of displacement, abuse, and pollution by industry has been assessed by Mexico solidarity activists as linked to neoliberal trade policies such as TPP and Plan Mérida (Plan Mexico).

The strategy of boycott and symbolic protest, however, hints at a broader conversation about our relationship to the land. Despite whitewashing and assimilation efforts, we have not forgotten our history of an indigenous peoples’ struggle for land, a local history of inter-ethnic labor solidarity. We continue to bear witness to and resist the daily brutality faced by the poor and working class at the hands of the police, as Oxnard pursues its development agenda. As descendents of the revolutionary ideals of Emiliano Zapata, we shall not drop our struggle for land and liberty for the people and work towards building sustainable alternatives.

In Solidarity with San Quintin, Washington and Oxnard
Colectivo Todo Poder al Pueblo